Stephen C. Angle, Professor of Philosophy, Wesleyan University, USA
“Kalmanson takes her long-standing commitment to comparative or crosscultural methodological interventions to the next level. This is philosophy at
its finest—creative, nuanced, accessible, and meaningful.”
Sarah A. Mattice, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies,
University of North Florida, USA
“This wonderful book lives up to the ambition of its title. Kalmanson draws on
linguistic and practice-based resources in ancient Chinese philosophy to breathe
new life into current existentialist thinking.”
Graham Parkes, Professorial Research Fellow of Philosophy, University of Vienna,
Austria
Engaging in existential discourse beyond the European tradition,
this cross-cultural study brings existential practices from Asian
philosophies to reassess questions of life’s purpose, death’s
imminence, and our capacity for living meaningfully in conditions
of uncertainty.
LEAH KALMANSON is Associate Professor in the Department of
Philosophy and Religion at Drake University, USA.
P H IL O S O P H Y
Cover image by Christopher Chiavetta, Green Key, 2019 (acrylic on paper, 12” x 12”).
Photo courtesy of Alyss Vernon, Olson-Larsen Galleries (West Des Moines, Iowa).
LEA H K AL MAN SO N
The investigation begins with 20th-century Korean Buddhist nun
Kim Iryŏp, who asserts that meditative concentration conducts
potent energy outward throughout the entire karmic network,
enabling the transformation of our shared existential conditions.
Understanding her claim requires a look at Asian sources more
broadly. From Buddhist merit-making ceremonies to Confucian/
Ruist methods for self-cultivation, and from the ritual memorization
of texts to Yijing divination, the book concludes by advocating
a speculative turn. This “speculative existentialism” counters the
suspicion toward metaphysics characteristic of European existential
thought and, at the same time, advances a program for action—not a
how-to guide for living, but a philosophical methodology that takes
seriously the power of mental cultivation to transform the meaning
of the life that we share.
CROSS - CULTURAL EXISTENTIALISM
“Kalmanson’s book exemplifies what is best about the new wave of cross-cultural
philosophizing. She elegantly and insightfully weaves sources from Korea and
China together with others from Europe and North America to challenge, enrich,
and ultimately re-direct existentialism.”
CROSS CULTURAL
EXISTENTIALISM
On the Meaning of Life
in Asian and Western Thought
ISBN 978-1-350-14001-1
9 0 1 0 0
Also available from
Bloomsbury Academic
www.bloomsbury.com
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781350 140011
LEA H KA LMA NSON
Cross-Cultural Existentialism
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Also available from Bloomsbury
Comparative Philosophy without Borders, edited by Arindam
Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber
Comparative Studies in Asian and Latin American Philosophies,
edited by Stephanie Rivera Berruz and Leah Kalmanson
Differences in Identity in Philosophy and Religion, edited
by Sarah Flavel and Russell Re Manning
Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy,
by Takeshi Morisato
Imagination: Cross-Cultural Philosophical Analyses, edited
by Hans-Georg Moeller and Andrew Whitehead
9781350140011_txt_print.indd 2
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Cross-Cultural Existentialism
On the Meaning of Life in Asian and
Western Thought
Leah Kalmanson
9781350140011_txt_print.indd 3
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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Copyright © Leah Kalmanson, 2021
Leah Kalmanson has asserted her right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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Cover image by Christopher Chiavetta, Green Key, 2019 (acrylic on paper, 12” x 12”).
Photo courtesy of Alyss Vernon, Olson-Larsen Galleries (West Des Moines, Iowa).
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Title: Cross-cultural existentialism : on the meaning of life in Asian and Western thought / Leah
Kalmanson.
Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references
and index. | Summary: “Expanding the scope of existential discourse beyond the Western
tradition, this book engages Asian philosophies to reassess vital questions of life’s purpose,
death’s imminence, and our capacity for living meaningfully in conditions of uncertainty. Inspired by
European existentialism in theory, the book explores concrete techniques for existential practice
via the philosophies of East Asia. The investigation begins with the provocative existential writings
of twentieth-century Korean Buddhist nun Kim Iryop, who asserts that meditative concentration
conducts a potent energy outward throughout the entire karmic network, enabling the radical
transformation of our shared existential conditions. Understanding her claim requires a study of
East Asian traditions more broadly. Considering practices as diverse as Song-dynasty Chinese views
on mental cultivation, Buddhist merit-making ceremonies, the ritual memorization and recitation of
texts, and Yijing divination, the book concludes by advocating a speculative turn. This ‘speculative
existentialism’ counters the suspicion toward metaphysics characteristic of twentieth-century
European existential thought and, at the same time, advances a program for action. It is not a howto guide for living, but rather a philosophical methodology that takes seriously the power of mental
cultivation to transform the meaning of the life that we share”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020020646 (print) | LCCN 2020020647 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350140011 (hardback)
| ISBN 9781350140028 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350140035 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Existentialism. Classification: LCC B819 .K235 2020 (print) | LCC B819 (ebook) |
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Contents
Acknowledgments
vi
Introduction: Toward a Speculative Existentialism
1 Meaningful Dilemmas: Existential Inquiry in the Western
Tradition
2 The Creation of New Values, Part I: Karmic
Transformations
3 The Creation of New Values, Part II: Cosmic
Correspondences
4 Rituals for Existential Re-habituation
Conclusion: Return to Inner Experience
1
Notes
References
Index
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17
41
69
95
129
143
168
182
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Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the advice, critical
feedback, and support of the members of my writing group, Aaron
Creller (University of North Florida), Andrew Lambert (College
of Staten Island), and Sarah Mattice (University of North Florida).
Their positive influence on the manuscript cannot be overstated; all
deficiencies are my own. I would like to thank Drake University for
granting the sabbatical leave that enabled this project in its early stages.
I would also like to thank my parents, Neil and Mary Kalmanson, who
were so excited to hear I was working on a book that they began telling
people about it before I’d actually written anything, which prompted
me to get started. Finally, I am grateful beyond words to my husband
Christopher Chiavetta, who was never bothered by the piles of books
on the kitchen table or the Chinese-language flash cards taped to the
walls, and who provided the artwork that I am so proud to have on
the cover.
Image Acknowledgment
Cover image by Christopher Chiavetta, Green Key, 2019 (acrylic on
paper, 12 x 12 inches). Photo courtesy of Alyss Vernon, Olson-Larsen
Galleries (West Des Moines, Iowa).
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Introduction: Toward a Speculative
Existentialism
The sovereign desire of beings is what is beyond being. Anguish is
the feeling of danger related to this inexhaustible expectation.
—Georges Bataille1
Sometimes it boggles the mind that death is still a mystery. If
philosophical “progress” is judged by traction gained on that particular
problem, then we cannot be said to have gotten very far. Yet our
impending mortality never fails to stir up opinions. Of course, we can
ignore the question of death, or call it absurd, or accept the inevitable
and move on—but any serious inquiry into the meaning of life must
give due credit to the persistent uncertainty of our final destination as
a motivating factor behind common existential concerns.
As will be evident in what follows, my own concerns tend toward
ultimate questions: the origins of existence, the nature of sentient
life, the mystery of death. Facing the sheer quantity of all these
uncertainties, my work in the present book grows out of a strong
belief that effective existential philosophy must be a practice as much
as it is a theory. This belief is not unique—European existentialists on
the whole take seriously the idea that their philosophies are meant to
be lived. However, as seen in Pierre Hadot’s (1922–2010) research on
ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, academics today have lost the
specific techniques for philosophical practice that were once central to
the discipline.2 In a telling comment, Hadot concludes his discussion of
Greek and Roman “spiritual exercises” by saying: “Not until Nietzsche,
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Cross-Cultural Existentialism
Bergson, and existentialism does philosophy consciously return
to being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing the world.”3
Undoubtedly the attention to concrete experience and everyday life
is a key feature of existential philosophy, but I find little evidence of
explicit instructions for “spiritual exercises” in the style of the ancient
Greeks and Romans in existential writings.4 As a result, without a
repertoire of practical strategies for existential re-habituation, certain
dilemmas of Western thought repeatedly reemerge at crucial junctures
in philosophical studies on the question of meaning in life.
In particular, a problematic understanding of subjective
interiority—the inner life of the mind—remains influential, despite
explicit theoretical moves taken in existential thought to reject,
subvert, or circumvent subject–object dualism and the metaphysical
picture of the self that accompanies it. For this reason, the present
exercise in cross-cultural existentialism looks to East Asian discourses
that approach the phenomenon of subjective interiority differently.
Such traditions not only include robust theoretical articulations of
the nature of inner life but also offer a range of practical techniques
for mental cultivation, self-transformation, and existential realization.
Some of these techniques, such as meditation, have already received
attention in contemporary cross-cultural philosophical literature;
but many of the practices that we will explore have not been taken
up within philosophy and certainly not within existentialism, such
as Buddhist merit-making ceremonies, the ritual memorization and
recitation of texts, and divination via the Yijing (᱃㏃) or Book of
Changes.
Along with such practices, we find what has been called a
“microcosm-macrocosm” model of the relations between humans and
their environments.5 This model assumes that fundamental structures
are isomorphic across myriad phenomena, from the smallest scale
to the largest, such that transformations at one level can potentially
reverberate up and down by means of corresponding systems.
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Introduction: Toward a Speculative Existentialism
3
As such, this model reframes the distinction between the inner
mind and the external world and thereby undermines a number of
binaries that have long shaped Western thought, such as realism and
idealism, rationalism and empiricism, and materialism and vitalism.
More provocatively, it challenges assumptions about the dividing
line between the natural and the so-called supernatural—a line that
either explicitly or implicitly limits what contemporary existentialism
will entertain as a reasonable or plausible answer to the question of
meaning in life. In other words, when we ask about what is really
meaningful, a lot depends on what we mean by reality.
Chapter 1: Is Anything “Really” Meaningful?
This book entertains a simple but provocative question: What if mental
experience is not unique to the brain or otherwise housed “within”
the skull? Reading a wide array of texts in East Asian philosophy,
we find the pervasive assumption that mental energies reside both
inside and outside the body, that such energies can interact with each
other, and that they in turn can interact with other types of energies in
the material environment.6 How might these assumptions about the
character of mental life affect existential inquiry?
As noted above, most contemporary philosophers reject the
idea of a metaphysical subject—historically, phenomenology and
existentialism in Europe, as well as analytic philosophy in the
Anglo-American world, all arose as reactions against metaphysical
speculation. For example, phenomenology attends to the minutia of
immediate experience without making claims as to the nature of the
“self ” or the metaphysical status of the subject. Likewise, contemporary
analytic philosophy looks into the relationship between the mind and
the brain from numerous perspectives, including philosophy of mind,
philosophy of science, and the more recent field of neurophilosophy.
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Cross-Cultural Existentialism
None of these discourses on either side of the continental–analytic
divide conceive of mental experiences as the kinds of energies routinely
mentioned in East Asian traditions. The present project exploits
the simple fact that, in rejecting the metaphysical subject, Western
philosophy has mostly rejected one or more of its own versions of
that subject (i.e., Plato’s rational charioteer of the body, the Christian
soul, Descartes’s “thinking thing,” and so forth). What if we return to
speculative philosophy for the sake of considering views on mental life
that do not reduce to one of these Western versions?
The investigation begins in the first chapter with a recent debate
between two prominent American philosophers over the question of
meaning in life, in which underlying assumptions about the subject–
object divide show up particularly clearly. Their disagreement
concerns whether, objectively speaking, existence has meaning, or if
instead meaningfulness is merely a quality of subjective experience.
As we will see, these are the only two options entertained: either
meaning exists “out there” somehow, independently of us; or meaning
is a figment of our minds. The first position seems to commit us to
a degree of realism or perhaps religion (i.e., the idea that meaning
exists on its own, like a Platonic form or a God-given fact), while the
second seems to resign us to nihilism in the end (i.e., the world at
large, regardless of the human experience of it, remains meaningless).
The remainder of the chapter contextualizes this dilemma within the
history of realist–idealist debates in Western thought. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, we see philosophy stumped again and again
by the limits of subjective experience, unable to speculate about what
might lie beyond, whether this refers to metaphysical realities or
simply the nature of objects presumed to be external to the mind.
We trace the impact of this dilemma on twentieth-century existential
philosophy, from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, to the related
writings of phenomenologists, and through recent critics who have
proclaimed phenomenology dead.
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Introduction: Toward a Speculative Existentialism
5
In particular, emerging fields such as speculative realism, new
materialism, and object-oriented ontology all criticize, in different
ways, the phenomenological picture of subjective interiority.7 Many
of these recent turns in continental philosophy and critical theory are
indebted to the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead
(1861–1947),8 whose work, as Steven Shaviro points out, has been
overshadowed by that of the existential phenomenologist Martin
Heidegger (1889–1976), in terms of influence on twentieth-century
and contemporary continental thought.9
The “speculative existentialism” developed in this book is inspired
by these recent critical turns in Western discourse but generally seeks
to ground itself in close readings of Asian philosophical material
with a minimum of comparative exposition. As said above, by
“speculative,” I mean that this work pushes back against the resistance
to metaphysics characteristic of contemporary phenomenology and
existentialism. But, I should also clarify, so-called metaphysics itself
is a category constructed by and within the parameters of Western
intellectual history, and so the extent to which the East Asian material
this book will engage should be called “metaphysical” is debatable.10
Rather than argue over the use of the term, I aim instead to read East
Asian philosophical claims about the nature of reality in their own
words, with reference to the original languages wherever possible,11
in order to see how these claims can change our understanding of the
practices central to human meaning-making.
In particular, by enabling us to challenge assumptions about the
parameters of subjective experience, East Asian discourses help
us redefine “speculation” itself not as the interior ruminations of a
subject looking out on the world but rather as a dynamic activity that
transforms both selves and their environments. Eiho Baba has recently
argued that the word usually translated as “perception” (zhijue ⸕㿪)
in Song-dynasty (960–1279) Chinese texts “is not a passive ‘seeing’ as
it were, of a predetermined reality, but a participatory determination,
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Cross-Cultural Existentialism
if not artistic production of the world through cultivated skills
of appreciation and realization.”12 As this shows, the Chinese
terminology helps to push the notion of speculation in a dynamic
direction—rather than reflecting states of mind, modes of awareness,
or theoretical attitudes, the Chinese terms for knowing and perceiving
all indicate the creative, mutually transformative interplay between
human consciousness and the world. A “speculative existentialism” is
a trans-egoic activity, not only an intellectual theory.
Chapters 2 and 3: On the Question of Meaning-Making
in East Asian Thought
Issues of translation and terminology figure prominently in any
cross-cultural philosophical venture. Before the terms “philosophy”
and “religion” were translated into Asian languages, early encounters
with European Christians show East Asian scholars and officials
attempting to classify foreigners according to local categories.13
They drew on precedents related to discourses surrounding the
reception of the Indian dharma or “teachings” in China vis-à-vis the
indigenous traditions of daojia/daojiao (䚃ᇦ/䚃ᮉ), or Daoism, and
rujia (݂ᇦ), or the “scholarly lineage” that has come to be called
“Confucianism” in the West.
Confucianism is a misleading term that suggests the historical
figure of “Confucius” (Kongzi ᆄᆀ, 551–479 BCE) was the founder
of a religious, or perhaps philosophical, movement. In fact, the
tradition known in Chinese as rujia well predates the life of Kongzi,
and Kongzi himself denies being an innovator.14 Rather, he was a
member of the “lineage” or “family” (jia ᇦ) of the ru (݂), a term
better translated as “scholar” or “literati.” The ru were members of
China’s educated elite: they were most often employed as educators
or government officials, they were versed in classic philosophical
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Introduction: Toward a Speculative Existentialism
7
and literary texts, and they were qualified to preside over various
state rites and civic ceremonies as well as the rituals performed at
ancestral shrines. Throughout this book, I use the alternative English
terms “Ruism” and “Ruists” to refer to the tradition and its members.
This use of Ruism also better conveys the sense in which the standards
of practice for the “scholars” or “literati” might be applied cross-culturally.
The historian Clinton Godart has commented: “When speaking about
‘Asian philosophy,’ the burden of proof is placed on the Asian traditions.
Questions are posed such as ‘was Confucianism philosophy,’ not ‘was
Hegel a Confucianist’ or ‘did he complete the Way?’ Thus Westernization
has created a cultural imbalance of categories and representations.”15 My
terminological choices in this book are often aimed at correcting this
imbalance. For example, it may sound strange to ask whether Hegel was
a “Confucianist” but less so to ask whether he was a good “scholar” by
Ruist standards. In this sense, along with Ruism, I use the term “dharma”
to speak broadly of Buddhism and its teachings related to enlightenment
or awakening (“buddha”16 means “awakened one”).
In general, I will be treating both Ruism and dharma as flexible
categories whose standards for practice can be applied across cultures
much as we already apply the standards definitive of “philosophy”
and “religion.”17 This captures the precise sense in which my work
is in “cross-cultural existentialism.” Compared to other fields
within philosophy, existentialism has been marked by diverse
voices, including scholarship in the African diaspora, such as Black
existentialism and Africana critical theory, as well as in Latin America,
and in Asia. My commitment to a methodological intervention via
Ruist and Buddhist scholarly practices is indebted to this boundarypushing and boundary-crossing heritage of existentialism as a field.
With all this in mind, I seek in the second chapter to understand
the provocative existential writings of the twentieth-century
Korean Buddhist nun Kim Wonju (1896–1971), dharma name
Iryŏp,18 who asserts that meditative concentration is not simply a
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Cross-Cultural Existentialism
private affair but instead conducts a potent energy throughout the
entire karmic network in which all beings are located, enabling
the radical transformation of our shared existential condition. To
understand what she could possibly mean will require philosophical
speculation. The key point—the reason why this existential project
must be speculative—is that a cluster of broadly Buddhist and Ruist
theoretical assumptions about the nature of mind and reality underlie
Iryŏp’s understanding of the efficacy of her meditation practices. I
would do a disservice to her thought were I to pluck such practices
out of this theoretical context and thereby avoid engaging her own
philosophical sensibilities.19
Buddhist views on emptiness and impermanence have already
inspired a number of major works in comparative philosophy on
existential themes, especially through engagement with the writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).20 That said, in order to contextualize
Iryŏp’s account of the trans-egoic power of meditation, the second
chapter pursues an alternative but complimentary track, taking
inspiration not from the Buddhist analysis of emptiness but from
everyday practices related to the production and exchange of karmic
merit via various ritual enactments. A study of this karmic economy
helps to explain the exchange of energy underlying Iryŏp’s seemingly
fantastical account of enlightened beings as creators of worlds and
her conviction that the “inner” experience of the meditator’s mind
reverberates well beyond the bounds of the body.21
In the end, we find that her provocative views on meditation require
a broader look at the relation of Buddhism to other philosophical
traditions in East Asia, especially Song-dynasty Ruist thought, which
began in China and spread as a scholarly movement into Korea and
Japan. As will become clear, my book is ultimately about the radical
existential vision of Ruism, a tradition that has, in general, received
less attention than Buddhism in comparative existential work. And,
accordingly, in this book I approach Iryŏp as a Ruist thinker as much
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Introduction: Toward a Speculative Existentialism
9
as a Buddhist, although this may at first seem counterintuitive, given
her progressive politics and feminist commitments. But Iryŏp is a
syncretic philosopher, whose deep ties to Christianity (her father
was a Methodist preacher) give her a unique perspective on the
philosophies of East Asia as well as the religious crises that inform
European existentialism. And syncretism is a key feature of the three
major East Asian traditions in general—Buddhism, Ruism, and
Daoism—which are marked by a long history of mutual influence and
accommodation. Given all this, Iryŏp’s idiosyncratic take on Buddhist
philosophy, which cannot be understood apart from the broader
East Asian philosophical assumptions that inform it, is a productive
starting point for this existential investigation.
Next, in the third chapter, I reexamine Iryŏp’s account of
meditation in light of East Asian theories on the cosmology and
ontology of qi (≓), which has roots in China’s earliest literature but
comes to the fore as a subject of philosophical speculation among the
Ruists of the Song (960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties. A
qi-based philosophy offers a plausible framework for explaining why
Buddhist practices are existentially transformative and, ultimately,
how activities at the microcosmic level of human awareness (e.g.,
meditation) have efficacious reach into the surrounding community,
environment, and even cosmos.
The term qi (≓) has been translated into English variously
as “vital stuff,”22 “psychophysical stuff,”23 and “lively material.”24
As theorized by the Song and Ming philosophers, anything that
exists is some form of qi, whether it is condensed and palpable, as
in physical objects, or dispersed and ethereal, as in the spiritual
energies of the human mind. The study of qi was simultaneously
the study of the corresponding term li (⨶), which refers to the
“structures,” “principles,” or “patterns” observable in qi’s actions
and tendencies.25 Through their investigations into qi and li, the
Song–Ming philosophers posed questions such as: Given the
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Cross-Cultural Existentialism
creative potency of qi, why does it configure itself into the world
as we know it, as opposed to other possible configurations? Does
a certain order (li) govern the behavior of qi? If so, how do we
apprehend and enact this order? Some philosophers assert that li
has no independent existence but only describes the tendencies
inherent in qi itself. Others seem to suggest that li is a governing
principle that does exist on its own and can be studied as such.
Many others take a position somewhere in between, speaking of the
mutual dependence of the two terms. As the famed Song-dynasty
scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200) says, “In the cosmos there has never
been any psychophysical stuff without structure nor any structure
without psychophysical stuff.”26
Above all, li refers to the correspondences that obtain between
various microcosmic and macrocosmic levels of reality. Zhu Xi himself
took inspiration from the opening passage of the Daxue (བྷᆨ) or
“Great Learning” section of China’s classical text the Liji (䁈) or
Book of Rites, which gives a clear picture of the mutually transformative
relations between microcosmic and macrocosmic structures:
The ancients, in wishing to illuminate luminous power in the world,
first brought good order to their own states. Wanting to bring
good order to their states, they first regulated their households.
Wanting to regulate their households, they first cultivated
themselves. Wanting to cultivate themselves, they first corrected
their minds. Wanting to correct their minds, they first made their
intentions sincere. Wanting to make their intentions sincere, they
first extended their knowledge. Extending knowledge consists in
investigating things. Investigate things, and knowledge is extended.
Extend knowledge, and intention becomes sincere. Make intention
sincere, and the mind becomes correct. Correct the mind, and the
self is cultivated. Cultivate the self, and the household is regulated.
Regulate the household, and the state is brought to good order.
Bring good order to the state, and the whole world will be at
peace. From the ruler down to ordinary people, all must regard the
cultivation of the self as the root.27
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Introduction: Toward a Speculative Existentialism
11
A structural isomorphism is evident between these different levels
named in the Daxue, which reflects what sinologist Jana Rŏsker has
described as “the structural compatibility of mind and the external
world.”28 In other words, there is a basic compatibility between the
heart-mind (xin ᗳ) of the sage and conditions in the surrounding
environment, both social and physical. An individual is certainly
impacted by her environment, but at the same time she can exert a
strong and charismatic influence over the world around her.
The recursive behavior of qi, or its ability to interact with itself in
its different phases to produce increasingly complex manifestations
of structure (li), is the key feature that enables the Daxue’s program
of personal, social, and environmental cultivation. In Ruist terms, the
sage (shengren 㚆Ӫ) is the person who has put in the time and effort
toward self-cultivation that enables her influence over surrounding
conditions. Self-cultivation is often described as a process of
manipulating the qi of the heart-mind to achieve stillness (jing 䶌),
numinosity (ling 䵸), and spiritual clarity (shenming ⾎᰾).29 In
contrast, petty or “small” people (xiaoren ሿӪ) fail to attain access
beyond the perspective of their own limited awareness. They barely
understand themselves, let alone the outside world and other people;
their qi remains turbid and cloudy.
The general framework of qi-philosophy provides crucial context
for understanding Kim Iryŏp’s views on meditation discussed in the
second chapter. As Kim claimed, meditation is not simply a private
experience but an efficacious practice that conducts transformative
energy into the surrounding world. Here, her language seems to
reflect overarching East Asian views on qi as much as her Buddhist
training. In fact, the three philosophical traditions of Ruism, Daoism,
and Buddhism converge on a key point that has far-reaching
implications for our existential engagement with the question of
meaning-making: namely, these traditions all agree that a creative
power issues forth from the well-cultivated heart-mind of a sage or
enlightened being.
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At this point we can better appreciate the resources that the
Chinese tradition brings to the project of speculative philosophy:
if we are looking for a mode of speculation that grants us access
to reality beyond the constraints of the ordinary subjective
perspective, then this intermixing of internal and external—this
resonant attunement of mind-qi through the apprehension of li—
is speculation par excellence. Issues such as solipsism, subjective
idealism, and other apparent dilemmas of subjectivity, which have
so frequently thwarted philosophical and existential inquiry in the
West, may turn out to be—no offence—only a function of limited
(xiao ሿ) thinking.
Power, Structure, and Meaning
In the engagement with Buddhism and Ruism in the second and third
chapters, we look not only for theoretical insights but for concrete
practices aimed at enacting this transformed and transformative
sage-consciousness under real-world conditions. In addition to
the terms qi and li above, a third Chinese philosophical concept
becomes important for articulating these practices: de (ᗧ), often
defined as “virtue” or “power,” is associated with forces of nature
and the momentum of natural cycles, the human capacity for radical
self-transformation, and the moral charisma of exemplary political
leaders.
The relation of structure (li) to power (de) in Chinese thought
points toward potential interventions in contemporary continental
philosophy and critical theory, which have what we might call a
deflationary account of subjective agency. In other words, the subject
is fully an effect of social power, produced and sustained through a
network of interlocking structures. The philosopher and sociologist
Maurizio Lazzarato succinctly expresses this general trend in his
recent study of capitalism and the construction of subjectivity:
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It is never an individual who thinks, never an individual who
creates. An individual who thinks and creates does so within a
network of institutions (schools, theaters, museums, libraries, etc.),
technologies (books, electronic networks, computers, etc.), and
sources of public and private financing; an individual immersed
in traditions of thought and aesthetic practices—engulfed in a
circulation of signs, ideas, and tasks—that force him or her to think
and create.30
This constructivist account of subjectivity is indebted to thinkers such
as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, who themselves owe much to
Friedrich Nietzsche’s hyperbolic declarations that the subject is a
fiction and all so-called truth claims are power-grabs in disguise.31
Many feminist philosophers aligned with the continental tradition
(and I count myself here) have wondered whether selves entirely
constituted by power relations are not thereby determined by those
relations. Various creative solutions have been suggested32 (and
Butler’s own account of agency grows more robust over time), but
still the possibilities for self-determination in the constructivist
framework all seem like small cracks in the wall of the larger and
dominating power structures that determine subjective life.
Reflecting on this situation, Foucault develops toward the end
of his career an interest in Hadot’s work and the forgotten practices
of Western philosophy mentioned above, especially Stoic and early
Christian practices of self-cultivation. As he writes: “Perhaps I’ve
insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am
more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and
others in the technologies of individual domination, the history of
how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of self.”33 In
this later work, we see a more optimistic and possibly liberatory side of
social constructivist theory—we are not simply at the mercy of larger
social forces but can play an active role in the construction of both self
and society. Exploring this liberatory potential, Foucault investigates
Stoic techniques for self-reflection, self-assessment, and self-control,
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Cross-Cultural Existentialism
hinging on various uses of meditation, abstinence, fasting, and so
forth. He comments: “In the culture of the Stoics, their function is to
establish and test the independence of the individual with regard to
the external world.”34
Here, in this moment of optimism, we again see familiar
philosophical territory—i.e., the split between inner experience and
outer world. In Foucault’s studies of both Stoic practices and Christian
ones (such as confession and self-renunciation), we see this conflict
between inner and outer, or between spirit and matter, marking an
uneasy relationship between the rational soul and the world and the
body that it occupies. Indeed, all such Greek, Roman, and Christian
practices give us a picture of the self that is indebted to the very
metaphysics of (spiritual) subject and (material) object that existential
philosophy rejects. Overall, if we are looking for a systematic account
of daily practices, both personal and social, that relate to enacting the
vision of trans-egoic meaning-making expressed in existential theory,
we will not find it within existential writings themselves.
My turn to East Asian sources, then, marks a sharp exit from the
binaries that covertly, or overtly, shape discourse about the human
condition in continental philosophy and critical theory. Nietzsche’s
call for the creation of new values still echoes—he was always
optimistic about the constructive force of his philosophy—but no one
has yet agreed upon what this value-creation requires.35 I want to take
thinkers such as Foucault, Butler, and especially Nietzsche out of their
home territory and resituate them in qi-based philosophy, where the
operation of structure and the efficacy of self-cultivation speak to the
fundamental permeability of “inner” and “outer.”
Chapter 4: Building a Qi-Based Existential Vocabulary
Although this is not a book about Friedrich Nietzsche, his ideas
appear at key junctures throughout the work. As we investigate the
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15
sage’s power to forge new values—values that are not simply the
projections of subjective meaning onto the world—I remain indebted
to Nietzsche and to cross-cultural philosophers who have engaged
him.36 The great comparative philosopher of Nietzsche, Graham
Parkes, tells us:
One can love the world if, like Zarathustra, one has experienced
it as all entwined and “perfect”—when as a streaming of will to
power one streams with the “streaming and counter-streaming,
and ebb and flood” of the ocean of energies that is the world as
will to power; when like the Confucian thinker Mencius one has
“cultivated one’s flood-like energies” so that they “fill the space
between heaven and earth” and harmonize with “the Way” of the
world; when like the Daoist sage one has accumulated one’s powers
(de) and emptied one’s mind so that one’s activity flows from
the Way of heaven and earth and the myriad processes; or when
one reaches that “fundamental level,” as Nishitani puts it, “where
the world moves at one with the self, and the self moves at one with
the world.”37
Amplifying these resonances between Nietzsche’s work and a range
of East Asian philosophies, the fourth chapter looks to build, in a
broad sense, a qi-based existential vocabulary. Mindful of Nietzsche’s
call for a new health—“the great health”38—speculative existentialism
investigates concrete techniques for “daily renewal” (rixin ᰕᯠ) and
“ceaseless vitality” (shengsheng bu xi ⭏⭏н), seeking to move
past the old existentialist values of anxiety, absurdity, and alienation,
to imagine new ones, rooted in the daily discipline and balanced
nourishment of philosophical practice.
The small set of terms I select—namely, solicitude (you ឲ),
seriousness (jing ᮜ), stillness (jing 䶌), sincerity (cheng 䃐),
and spontaneity (ziran 㠚❦)—would certainly not be labeled
“existentialist” anywhere within East Asian traditions themselves.
But, in turn, each idea helps us to reframe the vocabulary of Western
existentialism: solicitude instead of anxiety, seriousness instead of
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absurdity, stillness instead of alienation, and sincerity and spontaneity
in place of authenticity and freedom. Through this exercise, I do not
seek to answer Western existential questions so much as to gain new
perspective on the habitual modes of thinking that sustain those
lines of inquiry and consider possibilities for re-habituation. Indeed,
all of the terms I choose are associated with one or more practices,
be these scholarly methods, contemplative techniques, or closer to
what Western discourses would call religious rituals. In the end,
my goal is not to articulate speculative existentialism as a how-to
guide for meaningful living but rather an existential methodology
that takes seriously the power of self-cultivation and, accordingly,
recognizes the necessity of committing daily to the practices that
develop such power.
By the time the book concludes, we find that we have slowly
redefined the contested category of “inner experience.” Rather than
the phenomenological interiority indebted to a range of metaphysical
and anti-metaphysical positions, a qi-based philosophy explains
inner experience in terms of turbid and calm mental energies, which
are not categorically differentiated from bodily forms and physical
matter in general. The deepest sense of “inner experience,” on a qibased model, refers to the capacity of the heart-mind to relax into
its primordial and undifferentiated state through various scholarly,
ritual, and contemplative practices. By relinquishing accumulated
mental structures, the heart-mind refreshes itself and replenishes
its fundamental creative potency, making possible an existential
re-habituation that speaks to the productive power of speculative
thought.
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